1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image recording apparatus for recording an original image, accompanied by information for identifying each original image, on a recording medium.
2. Related Background Art
Storage of original images on microfilms or optical or magnetic disks have already been adopted for saving the storage space of various original documents generated in a large number, such as business forms, cheques or the like. For enabling easy access to such stored images, there is required input of index information corresponding to each image, but the input operation of such index information has been extremely time consuming. For solving this problem, there is already known an apparatus for reading the image on the original document and simultaneously reading code information, attached in advance to said original document as index information, with a suitable mechanism such as a bar code scanner, a magnetic image character reader (MICR), or an optical character reader (OCR).
In such known apparatus, an original document such as a business form or a cheque, bearing a bar code as the index information, is placed on a photographing position, and the image of said document is recorded on a microfilm in a photographing unit while the bar code of said original document is read with a bar code reader at the same time.
The bar code thus read is stored in a memory in such a manner that said bar code corresponds to the address (frame) number of the image recorded on the microfilm, thereby ensuring easy access to the image later.
In such conventional apparatus, however, the index information will be lost if the bar code of the original document is smeared, or the document lacks such bar code for some reason. For such original document there is required a manual input of the corresponding index information afterwards into the memory.
However the business forms etc. often have a back-printed carbon layer for copying, which tends to smear another form when it is superposed thereon. Besides such business forms are often handled rather roughly. Consequently the above-mentioned trouble occurs quite frequently, and it is not easy to find out the original document for which the bar code has not been read. For this reason the above-mentioned input operation is not efficient, and the access to the stored image later may become impossible if said input operation is forgotten.
Also in such conventional apparatus, the manipulation is cumbersome because the operation of input of the index information with the bar code scanner is conducted independently from the photographing operation of the original image on the microfilm with a photographing switch. A possibility therefore exists that the access to the stored image becomes impossible because the input of the index information is forgotten at the photographing operation.